The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  “I prefer it,” she said.

  The roshi stretched out her legs. Fat and flexible, her head covered in a short gray stubble and scars, she reminded Cheyenne of a brawling stray dog.

  On the desk Livy saw a framed photo of a young woman. She had on thick black eyeliner and was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and leather jacket, and she pointed above her to a marquee that read TONIGHT! THE CURE. Livy trained her ears on the sounds of rush-hour traffic, which came through the walls and window—honking geese and birds of prey—interspersed with sounds from the kitchen.

  The roshi’s blue eyes moved from one sister to the other. Livy’s skin got hot at the throat and behind her ears. She wanted to scream and that anger made her tear up. But the idea that the older woman might think she was crying was too much, so she began to glare back.

  “I am not your mother,” said the roshi. “If you had called ahead, I would have told you.”

  The roshi let the words fall, ax-like. Cheyenne’s breath caught. Livy looked away.

  “There is a chance that I knew her, though,” said the roshi, crossing her legs. “The abbot told me some of the story you told him. I’d like to hear it from you.”

  “We were born on the same day,” said Livy.

  “Same father, different moms,” said Cheyenne.

  The roshi nodded. “That’s quite a hat trick.”

  “Our moms threw the I Ching and the midwife lied on the birth certificates,” said Cheyenne. “There was all this myth around it.”

  “We were told she was the North Star,” said Livy.

  “People tell kids all sorts of things,” said the roshi. “A lot of people are adopted.”

  “It felt different from other adoption stories,” said Cheyenne.

  The roshi smiled. “Everyone’s personal story feels different than other people’s stories.”

  The older woman glanced at the sunlight now disappearing from the alley. As she turned her head, her eyes flashed, reflecting. There was a bell in the corridor and the sisters turned toward the sound.

  “It’s for the dinner crew,” said the roshi.

  A minute later, the sun was entirely gone from the alley and the roshi’s room had gone from tawny to dark rose and was now almost too dark for the three women to read one another’s expressions.

  “There was one woman,” she said. “She came to the monastery around the right time. The right age too. Her name was Justine but later someone told me her real name was Ann. We weren’t close.”

  15 The Universe

  AT AGE NINETEEN, Kirsten had quit eating meat and started living solely on cheese fries. Two months later she showed up at the clinic where Margaret worked, anemic. Kirsten’s visits had become rare. In the earlier years of their relationship she’d seen Margaret every few months. Now she only grabbed condoms occasionally and waved. The nurse-midwife, while still elevated in Kirsten’s summation of the world, was no longer new to it. She might be outgrowing Margaret; she wasn’t sure, but since she was overdue for a Pap smear and felt like shit she made an appointment.

  Margaret put Kirsten in a gown and drew her blood. She made her pee in a cup and have a breast exam, then told her to get dressed. While waiting for the test results, Kirsten told Margaret about all the wild things that had been happening. Kirsten had been hanging out in metaphysical bookstores; she’d been throwing staves and tying colored yarn on candles.

  “It’s like I’m talking to the Universe and she’s talking back,” she told Margaret. “It’s like there’s a conversation between everything that’s going on all the time and I finally understand what’s being said.”

  Margaret didn’t seem interested. It turned out the Unicorn of Radical Feminism was a materialist. Kirsten refused to let that stand.

  “But in history they used to worship goddesses and everyone was peaceful, not asshole warmongers, and that’s how we have agriculture and writing. They believed in the great mother so they didn’t kill things all the time. That would be better than this, right? If we had goddesses, it would be totally different.”

  “Yes,” said Margaret, “except the only country on earth that actually worships goddesses engages in wife burning and promotes fetal scans to determine the baby’s sex so they can abort it if it’s a girl.”

  Seeing Margaret was fucking depressing.

  The medical assistant knocked and handed Margaret a slip of paper.

  “I think I’m psychic,” said Kirsten.

  “You’re pregnant,” said Margaret.

  After leaving Margaret, Kirsten had walked to the arboretum, where the trees flushed green and knotted buds were just starting to crack in the soft spring heat. She could feel her new body. Pregnant. All in. Kirsten pushed open the door to Cyril’s studio apartment. Neither Ann nor Cyril was home. The Murphy bed was down and unmade. The tile counter of the kitchenette was stacked with several days’ worth of dishes and the black-and-white-checked floor, splattered with spaghetti sauce. Something had been shifting in the apartment between the three of them. She could feel it even when the others were gone. They were all sliding toward something they couldn’t see.

  When Ann returned, Kirsten barely waited for her to get through the door.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  Ann shrugged. “So am I.”

  Kirsten stared.

  “It’s not a miracle,” said Ann. “We’ve both been here a couple of months. Our cycles lined up. Are you going to use pennyroyal?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Kirsten.

  “Pennyroyal’s way better than a D&C,” she said. “It just takes a few days.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” asked Kirsten.

  “You take more.”

  Maybe it was her vegetarian’s sense of ambivalence about causing any form of death or perhaps only teenage sentimentality, but she couldn’t imagine aborting. The Universe is either talking to you or it isn’t.

  “I’m going to keep it,” said Kirsten.

  Ann gave a whip-crack laugh. “Then maybe I will too,” she said.

  When they told Cyril, he paid up for two months of rent and left.

  Good riddance.

  * * *

  —

  As the months passed, their hair thickened and twice as much blood filled their bodies. They got health care, and free cheese and peanut butter. Something began to bother Kirsten, though. Ann was thrilled to be pregnant. She was fascinated by the drama in her body. Yet there was something forensic in her interest. She had no reaction to strangers touching her belly, whereas Kirsten wanted to knife anyone who tried.

  “Do you believe in destiny?” Kirsten asked Ann one night.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think everyone has one?”

  Ann laughed. “Some people are doomed to be boring stupid peasants.”

  “Do you think it’s possible for someone to miss their destiny?”

  “How can you miss it? That’s the point.”

  “Maybe it’s like talent,” said Kirsten. “Maybe you can have it but let it go to waste.”

  Ann was a devout believer in her own brilliant future, and Kirsten could see the idea bothered her. Kirsten pulled a book she’d gotten from the library out of her backpack.

  “Have you ever heard of the I Ching? You throw coins and look up the hexagrams and it tells you about your superior path so you don’t miss it,” she said. “You’ll like it. It’s kind of like Chinese dice.”

  Ann loved games of chance. She considered any loss she suffered an anomaly. She was fascinated with her own destiny.

  “We should play for something real,” said Kirsten, and got three pennies.

  It would be a home birth. Totally underground. No drugs. No permission.

  * * *

  —

  Kirsten got a bottle of wine out of the
fridge and a fifth of vodka out of the freezer. She put them both on the table next to a loaf of day-old challah and a tub of roasted garlic hummus. It was her night to host the coven. After thirty-one years of meeting they had become less of a magic circle than a place for microloans, chiropractic recommendations, and unwanted advice.

  She got out the glasses and cut the challah on the breadboard. She hadn’t heard from Livy or Cheyenne since they left. Maybe now they knew that the woman they were going to see wasn’t Ann. Or maybe they were just about to find that out. She didn’t care. Hate me for it! Go ahead. I owe you nothing.

  Having an organizing myth is good. This had been her thinking. Myths give heroic shape to adolescence in a time devoid of initiation. The story was supposed to free them from the mundane. It was a condom to lower the risk of spiritually transmitted diseases like monogamy and patriarchy. But to have power, myths need drama. They need transcendent beauty. And in the ugly blocks of subsidized housing, surrounded by fast-food chains, penned in by arterial roads without sidewalks, over that year when they had moved from one dismal apartment without natural light to the next, always with black mold blooming on walls punched with jacks for cable you can’t afford to use, how was she supposed to give them that? And in order for them to work, myths require initiation and initiation requires profound emotional confusion. You need to lose something you hold dear. Something you thought made you what you were.

  That’s the price of entry.

  16 Polaroid

  “JUSTINE?” ASKED LIVY.

  The roshi nodded. “She got mail addressed to Ann sometimes. Like I said, we weren’t close.”

  It was night now. The roshi raised herself on one knee and turned on an electric light that flared their faces white.

  Justine, Justine, Justine…Cheyenne said the name under her breath. A chill went through her, a current she transferred to Livy.

  “Do you know where she is?” asked Cheyenne.

  “I have no idea how to reach her. It’s been years. I heard a rumor she went to Bolivia but that may not be true. Why do you have a right to know?”

  Cheyenne and Livy looked at each other. It wasn’t a question they’d expected.

  “You know, the older I get,” said the roshi, “the more I wonder if there is something colonial about curiosity. If I want, I should have. If I’m curious, I should know.” She straightened. “Who exactly do you think comes to places like this? I mean comes and stays. Massage therapists and tour guides? Who turns over the keys to their life and says shave my head and tell me what to do? People who can no longer trust themselves. The suicidal and mentally ill. Those with violent intentions. The past is different for men than for women. Even here, though we like to pretend it isn’t. When men become monks they can talk about almost anything they did. They can say they murdered someone and people don’t make much of it. It’s almost romantic. But women don’t talk about leaving a child behind. Not if they were adults when they did it. Justine could have had that story. Every woman I’ve ever known could have had that story, and I would never have known.”

  Livy flinched. It was all too easy to imagine. The roshi smiled softly.

  “What was she like?” asked Cheyenne.

  “I didn’t know her well. She had a kind of ambition I found unsettling. I’m sure she was just a messed-up kid like the rest of us.” The roshi paused. “I might have a picture of her.”

  The roshi went to the bookshelf and pulled out a beat-up copy of the Tassajara Cookbook. Inside the pages were Polaroids. She sorted through, then picked one out.

  “This was taken at Great Prairie in Montana the first year I was there.”

  She handed the photo to Cheyenne. A group of young women stared into the lens. Their eyes burned, newly arrived, magnetic. One had a freshly shaved head, the others didn’t. The roshi touched the face of the woman with the shaved head. “That’s Justine.”

  The woman with the shaved head was freckled with full lips. Her expression reminded Livy of Cheyenne, but only a little. Cheyenne thought maybe she saw a shade of the young Livy. Mostly what they saw was someone who was very young.

  “You can have it,” said the roshi.

  Livy took the Polaroid from Cheyenne, holding it carefully by its edges. Something untranslatable stirred, a vertigo she could not push away. She handed it back to Cheyenne, who put it in her jacket pocket.

  Watching the reaction of the sisters to seeing the young woman, the roshi added, “I have to tell you, it’s hard for me to imagine the Justine I knew carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term. She was not sentimental.”

  17 The Wharf

  OUTSIDE THE MONASTERY, a Friday night in Boston swallowed them whole. Noise from the bars and the streets, the early drunks, the taxis, and the tourists everywhere around them.

  “It can’t be over,” said Cheyenne.

  Livy rolled her shoulders and squeezed her eyes shut. “Fuck, I can’t believe I let you talk me into missing this much work. Drive us out and I’ll take a shift once we’re on the turnpike.”

  Exhaling, she trotted goat-like down the steps.

  “I need to walk first,” said Cheyenne. “I’m too wound up to get in a car.”

  “We need to go now.”

  Cheyenne glared at her sister. “You’re really making this worse. It’s bad enough as it is.”

  Livy saw that Cheyenne was on the verge of crying, which might come out in several ways. “Chill out,” she said. “We can walk a bit.”

  “Thank you,” said Cheyenne, but didn’t move.

  On the corner, a group of young men spilled out of a bar.

  “Lawyers,” Cheyenne said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Jackson and I used to come here for conferences.”

  “I can’t imagine you at a conference.”

  “I didn’t go. I wandered around and showed up when they were done.”

  Two tears welled, balanced on the bottom of Cheyenne’s eyelids, then broke and ran down her cheeks.

  “Oh hold it together,” said Livy. “She might have been my mom.”

  Cheyenne laughed loud enough to scare a pigeon off the rim of a trash can but seconds later had new tears in her eyes.

  “Will you stop blubbering if I let you stay at my place another month?” said Livy.

  Cheyenne wiped her cheeks. “Yes, I promise.”

  But Livy knew it was a mistake—felt sick thinking about it.

  Cheyenne started walking. One of the guys on the corner yelled a girl’s name into the traffic. Cheyenne crossed the street away from them.

  They reached the Common. From where they stood, the fountain ahead was black and they couldn’t tell if it had water in it.

  “Congratulations,” said Cheyenne, “you’re on the Freedom Trail.” She pointed to the green. “They do reenactments here sometimes.”

  “Of what?”

  “Revolutionary War things. The whole reenactment thing is so fucked up. All those Civil War guys?”

  “A Japanese guy I fished with said it’s the same with samurais.”

  Cheyenne laughed. “Can you imagine if they reenacted women’s history? Hundreds of teenagers in bonnets dying in childbirth? It would be fucking perfect. Heroic midwives race between bedsides covered in blood. I hate this part of the country.”

  Reaching the wharf they stopped. Schooners were docked with sails furled. A re-creation of an eighteenth-century tall ship rocked gently in the quiet water. Livy watched someone near the bowsprit light a cigarette then cup it, take two drags, and throw it into the water.

  “Well this is the end of the tour unless we jump in,” said Cheyenne.

  Livy shook herself alert then pulled out her phone to check the time. There was a voice mail from an unknown number. She listened and handed the phone to Cheyenne. It was a job assignment from the temp agency she’d sig
ned up for. Cheyenne played the message back and called the number. Listening, she punched in a few numbers and hung up.

  “It’s automated. You can accept or deny jobs.” She gave Livy the phone.

  “When do you need to be back?” asked Livy.

  Cheyenne put her hands in her pockets and twisted one way, then the other.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said about how you thought I would go back to school and I think I will. If I go back I won’t have to dodge the student loans from last time anymore so I’ll have credit and,” Livy began to speak but Cheyenne put her hand up, “I’ll qualify for grants and loans so I can pay any back rent I owe in one lump sum with interest.”

  Livy felt queasy again.

  They reached the car and Cheyenne got in the driver’s seat.

  “God I feel so much better,” she said. She pulled into the street. “History or art therapy,” she said. “One of those, at least to start.”

  As she drove, Cheyenne chattered about being a teacher or a counselor or a spiritual adviser—but the kind that doesn’t really believe in anything but still wants to help—until they were back on the turnpike. Finally Livy cut her off.

  “Did they say how long this temp job would be?”

  “I don’t know. I declined it.”

  Livy burned but said nothing. Half an hour later they stopped at a travel plaza to switch off driving. Cheyenne popped the trunk and got her bag out of the back.

  “I want to change clothes,” she said, and handed Livy the keys.

  Livy handed her the credit card. “Go put thirty dollars on pump number two and get a quart of oil. I’ll fuel up.”

  After she filled up and parked, Livy went to the bathroom and washed her face. Cheyenne came in without oil. She went into the stall to change, pulling out a blue cotton shirt stained with ketchup and a pair of black pinstripe pants still damp from where she’d tried to scrub off dried peanut butter the night before. She put them on and stepped out of the stall.